Defending the Christian faith and promoting its wisdom against the secular and religious challenges of our day.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

GOD REQUIRES EXTRAORDINARY EVIDENCE, BUT SO DOES THE MULTIVERSE

Carl Sagan had famously written: “Extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence.” This makes a lot of sense. If my neighbor
claims that he had just been voted the “Man of the Year,” I would be skeptical.
However, if he had merry claimed that his wife regarded him as her “man of the
year,” I would be satisfied without any evidence.

However, should the same skepticism also apply when my
neighbor claims that God is the explanation of consciousness, life, freewill, and
the fine-tuning of the universe? Admittedly, this is an extraordinary claim,
but let’s just examine one aspect of it – the extraordinary fine-tuning of the
universe. Some have calculated the chances of having a universe fine-tuned for
life to be one chance in 10 followed by 100 zeros.

I want to argue that any
explanation of fine-tuning requires an extraordinary explanation – either supernatural
(ID) or a natural explanation. This consideration therefore transforms our
question into, “Which paradigm is best?”

The natural explanation invokes the multiverse, reasoning that
if there are an infinite number of universes, it is likely that our fortuitous
universe would be one of them. However, this seems to be the most extraordinary
claim:

1. There is no scientific evidence for even a second universe, let alone an infinite
number.

2. There is no known mechanism that
can generate universes out of nothing.

3. There is no evidence that
anything has ever been caused naturally and without intelligence.

4. It can provide no answer for the
elegance, universality, and immutability for our fine-tuned laws of science.

In light of these problems, rather than the ID paradigm as
extraordinary, it would seem that naturalistic paradigm requires more support
and represents a desperate attempt to remove God from the picture. Science
writer, John Horgan, confessed that:

·“The key thing that distinguishes science from
non-science is that scientific ideas have to be subject to tests. Some people are
nowadays thinking, no, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.” (Regis
Nicoll; Salvo Magazine; Summer 2017,
38)

Tim Folger, writing for Discover
Magazine, claimed that the multiverse is the “only viable non-religious
explanation”:

·“Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many
physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of
perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of
those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for
life….The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a
scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or
disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the
only viable non-religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning
problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem
custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life. (“The Multiverse Theory,” Dec.
2008)

Perhaps the multiverse requires even more extraordinary
evidence than ID. As a naturalistic theory, it only can serve to explain the “fine-tuning
problem.” In order to explain life, consciousness, DNA, the first cell, the
existence of natural causal agents, the first cause, and freewill, naturalism
must invoke entirely different theories for each. And with each additional
theory or postulate, it makes itself even more improbable, thereby violating
Occam’s Razor. However, ID has only one necessary postulate – God!

Columbia University mathematician and atheist Peter Woit has
expressed serious doubts about the multiverse:

·…The idea of assuming a Multiverse and using it
to make statistical predictions doesn’t work. But instead of drawing the
obvious conclusion (this was a scientifically worthless idea, as seemed likely
to most everyone else), the argument is that we need a “revolution in our
understanding of physics” that will make the idea work.

According to science writer, Denise O’Leary, “Woit blames
the Templeton Foundation [for funding and purveying this meritless idea]. It
appears to have given $15 million to physicist to pursue these questions, and
$10 million to the publishing group Nautilus…And he does not understand “why
the rest of the physics community is staying quiet.” (Salvo Magazine; Summer 2017, 50)

Why the quiet? Why the tenacious grasp of the multiverse?
Perhaps this represents a desperate attempt to keep God out of the picture. According
to evolutionist and geneticist Richard Lewontin:

·We take the side of science in spite of the
patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill
many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance
of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we
have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism [that nothing exists apart
from matter and energy]. It is not that the methods and institutions of science
somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world,
but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material
causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that
produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, …Moreover, that
materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Clearly, the presence of God is unwelcome in the bastions of
science, even at the expense of adopting science-less theories and purveying
them as facts. O’Leary writes:

·Vast evidence supports the view that our
universe and our planet are fine-tuned for life, which suggests a cosmic scheme
based on some type of meaning, purpose, or intelligence. By contrast, no
evidence supports the multiverse.

Rather than proposing the highly unlikely multiverse, it is
more reasonable to claim that we are very limited in our understanding about
the origins of the universe and fine-tuning.

While this is true, we have to observe that we are also very
limited about our understandings of the fundamentals – light, matter, energy,
time, and space. However, this limitation should not prevent us from doing
science or from going where our limited evidence leads.